West Side Story and other complicated stories

I took the kid to see West Side Story and her takeaways from the experience have been a little muddled and very touching and kind of hilarious.

WSS is, of course, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, set in 1950s NYC and pitting white gang members against Puerto Rican gang members. And much like in the source material, nobody really wins. WSS is brimming with mid-century racial tension (thank goodness our society has gotten past that whole not-getting-along-with-folks-who-speak-Spanish thang, amiright?) and has a death toll of three, all of whom are killed on stage.

The most mature plot points (and all the Spanish curse words) went straight over her four-year-old head. But she got enough of the action to ask a million questions, none of which did I have a suitable answer for.

“Why were they fighting? Was it because some of them were ‘Torta Ricans’ and some weren’t? Why did Chino kill Tony? I thought Tony was a good guy? He really loved Maria. And did you see how sad Maria was when Tony got shooted? Chino must have been a bad guy. Actually, a lot of them must have been a bad guy. Tony was just going to try to stop the fight but then they thought he was there to fight too and then he killed that man in the purple shirt even though he was there to try to stop the fight but he ended up fighting anyway. And were those knife-es [always pronounced with two syllables] real? The gun made a loud sound even though you said it wasn’t real. And why did that girl tell those Jets that Maria was dead even though Maria was really alive and she loved Tony and not Chino?”

This went on from curtain call until bedtime. I tried to explain that the Jets and the Sharks felt threatened by one another, that each of the kids in the story had tough lives in their own way. I caught myself saying “disenfranchised” and stopped. I couldn’t bring myself to explain that Anita lied about Maria being dead because Tony’s friends tried to rape her.

In the end, I talked (again, and no doubt badly) about race and Martin Luther King, Jr. and I’m sure I’m doing a terrible job at helping her wrap her innocent little brain around some of the more complicated things her fellow humans choose to do.

Maybe the show was too mature for her. But she loved it — loved the singing and the dancing and the beautiful costumes. Plus, theater is important, and I want to give her the opportunity to grow to love it as much as I do. At any rate, by the time she went to sleep, she had likened West Side Story to The Lion King, a supposed children’s movie which at its heart is a tribal power grab that leaves a young cub fatherless and ostracized. Plus, she pointed out how much happier everyone would be if Tony and Chino and the other Jets and Sharks had just used their words instead of knife-es and guns. If she got all that, then that’s not a bad takeaway.

Now she wants to see Cats.

(Note to Hazel’s teachers: If you hear her loudly screeching “My sister wears a mustache/my brother wears a dress/goodness gracious that’s why I’m a mess,” it’s from a song. I’ve tried dissuade her from singing the “Gee, Officer Krupke… KRUP YOU!” part, but I make no promises. You have my apologies.)